Biases and the Ark Project

At AiG, including inside our Creation Museum, we constantly share with people that their worldview is a starting point for how they interpret scientific evidence about the unobservable past. In a striking exhibit inside the museum, for example, our first display states that both creationists and evolutionists possess the same evidence, but that evidence can be interpreted differently according to a person’s starting point or worldview. In that first museum room, a scene depicts the fossil dig site of a dinosaur. The exhibit shows how an evolutionist researcher and creationist researcher working at the dig site examine the same dinosaur bones but come to different conclusions about the history of dinosaurs.

We often see this “starting points” phenomenon, as we call it, in the evolution/creation debate, and it was on display a few weeks ago. We had alerted people that AiG would make an announcement soon about the future of the Ark Encounter, a full-size Noah’s Ark to be built in our northern Kentucky area. We wanted people to watch an online press conference that evening, where we would give them an update on this evangelistic Ark project. As we got the word out through email blasts and on our website earlier in the day, we simply stated that we were going to give an update on our “attempt” (the word we used) to raise funds for the Ark Encounter. We intentionally used the word attempt because we did not want to tip our hand one way or other about the announcement, which was the wonderful news that the bond offering for the Ark Encounter had successfully closed, as tens of millions of dollars in bonds had been sold for the project.

At the same time we knew, since we used words like attempt and effort, that some non-Christians who were against the Ark project would jump to the conclusion that it was a “failed attempt.” For those who were in support of the Ark project, we thought that most of these Christians would interpret the announcement and the use of the word attempt in a positive way. Just as we predicted, some evolutionists quickly began posting blogs and making Facebook comments that interpreted the word attempt with a negative connotation—that the bond offering was an attempt that failed.

It just further proved our point that people’s starting points—biases and presuppositions—can color how they view evidence or even one word.